"USB 3.0 might be one of the big stories here at IDF, but Intel just showed off a glimpse of the future: Light Peak, an optical interconnect for mobile devices that can run as fast as 10Gbps. That's fast enough to do everything from storage to displays to networking, and it can maintain those speeds over 100-meter runs, which is pretty astounding. Intel says the idea is to drastically reduce the number of connectors on mobile devices, which should allow them to get even smaller - but the demo was on a huge Frankenrig, so don't expect to see Light Peak devices shipping any time soon."

Infiniband already has an optical physical layer. Also the technology was originally developed by Intel as a peripheral device interconnect but was overtaken by PCI as the preferred internal peripheral bus. Since intel already owns the technology it would not suprise me to find some of the IP elements of IB inside Lightpeak. As to connector and hub costs - the demo rig did not appear to be inexpensive and in the articles they are citing consumer deployments as being the road to low cost.